Memes of Production

We agree entirely. Anyone who expects China to be good or to try to become good is going to be confused by reality. China will develop according to the material conditions it operates under. Since those conditions are capitalism, it would be foolish moralism to expect them to do the good thing in spite of their structural incentives, so they will remain capitalist indefinitely.

This is so misguided on so many level. The moral label you attach to an entity is not real. China is no more good or evil than a rock is good or evil. Morality is idealism, and it has absolutely zero explanatory power. No one will ever build communism because they are "good" just like no one ever built capitalism because they were "evil". If your entire theory of liberation requires a group of people to be "good", then you're doomed.

But even worse is that you also obviously have zero understanding of capitalism. Marx tried to tell you. Maybe you read it and you thought he was wrong? Maybe you didn't read it? Capitalism is internally contradictory. It is a system in an unstable dynamic equilibrium. It will collapse. No society can remain capitalist indefinitely, it's logically impossible.

Anyway: Holodomor, Cambodia, Ethiopian Red Terror, Uyghurs.

Holodomor - not a genocide. The most widely accepted international scholarship has established this. The attempts to label it a genocide either stretch the definition of genocide to include many many many other events that we don't consider genocides or they require ignoring and deliberately omitting a lot of facts about the situation.

Cambodia - Cambodia was a genocide. Was it an ML genocide? Let's look. Oh, that's funny. It was an extreme nationalist party that organized itself around MLism from a party discipline standpoint, but discarded literally everything else like "no privileges for any one nation, complete equality of nations and the unity, amalgamation of all workers of all nations". So, you could say I'm committing a No True Scotsman, or we could actually look at the tenets of MLism and just do a basic test. The Khmer Rouge standout among all ML parties on their xenophobic nationalism and genocide on the basis of racial hierarchy.

Ethiopian Red Terror - Like the National Socialists, the Derg used the aesthetics of communism and absolutely none of the theory. The EPRP, actual Ethiopian Marxists, say this, not me. The Derg was not a worker's party. It was not a vanguard of the proletariat. It did not use democratic centralism. If you're going to just believe anyone who says they're anything, than Donald Trump is a non-racist Christian and a good businessman.

Uyghurs - Such an interesting genocide that results in population growth of the people every single year that the supposed genocide is happening, don't you think? Such an interesting genocide where the people still keep their language, their religion, their cultural traditions, still keep their connections to global communities, still communicate with them, still host international conversations. If you believe there's a genocide of Uyghurs, well, I don't know if I can help you. In fact, based on these 4 examples, I would have to say you're an easy mark for grifters.

If all you’re going to do is ape capitalism because “it’s the one that works”, you’re just a capitalist with extra steps.

This is so weird. There's no "aping" going on. There's no tailism either. Literally are you saying that China should have just not industrialized until they figured out how to do it without capitalism? They should have stayed a deeply impoverished agrarian society for another few decades, or more, because they have a moral duty to figure out how to do it without using the mechanisms of capitalism? They didn't ape capitalism. They organized their society to use capitalism for what capitalism is good at, and they took real substantive steps before they implemented capitalism to limit the influence capitalism would have on their society. It's why even though they have stock markets and therefore private property, not a single corporation or billionaire owns any land. The CPC, understanding how capitalism works, took away many of the tools capitalism uses to empower itself against governance. So far, the CPC gambit is working. Obviously it remains to be seen if it does - communism is experimental, as I'm sure you know, and the Chinese experiment is a new one.

I guess the USA was run by communists too because poverty decreased massively from 1870 to 1970.

I mean, not for nothing, but the USA actually had a lot of communists during the industrial revolution, and they fought hard to keep their surplus value. Labor unions were powerful. There was literally armed warfare between workers and owners, and yes, a lot of socialists got elected into various offices. That's ultimately why the US had to have a purge in 1917 with the first Red Scare (which, by the way is a great tell for why the USA wasn't run by communists). But more importantly, the US only saw something like 15 percentage points of poverty alleviation through WWII. So no, the US did not massively reduce poverty between 1870 and 1970. They massively reduced poverty between 1950 and 1970 because they were the only country left standing untouched by WWII and they exploited the fuck out every single country in the world.

China, on the other hand, is posting 88 percentage points of poverty alleviation, without a war economy and without the exploitation of war torn nations. These are fundamentally different things.

Strange, though, the US had a stock market during its industrial revolution, while China is only introducing the stock market after it has already lifted those 800M out of poverty

Do you normally write this much without any research whatsoever? China created its stock market in 1990, well before it hit even the half-way mark of its current poverty alleviation. So, just factually incorrect. Are you just running on vibes?

Somehow China managed to do all that without ever needing a stock market. Almost as if an economy can industrialize perfectly well without one and the reason for adopting a stock market has nothing to do with efficient industrialization…

Uh. Right. So anyway, back in the real world, China opened its first stock market in 1990 specifically to solve the problem of liquidity allocation for its most capital intensive industries because, ya know, it's a useful system for doing that. It took them a decade of preparation to open the stock market, because instead of it being driven by merchants like the West did, it was driven by the CPC looking specifically to solve resource allocation problems at the new scale they were up against as their industry began to scale.

Anyway, coming back to moralism, I’m sorry, but I do want my society to be good

Tough shit. Morality is a subjective descriptor. Societies don't choose actions because they are good. Societies are good because they choose actions. If your subjective description of "morally good" requires self-defeating actions, you're never going to be in a good society, or if you are, its contradictions will undo itself.

I understand that a society being good doesn’t make sense on its own, that’s why anarchocommunism has prefiguration. We need to shape the material conditions to produce good things if we want good things, which we do

Holy shit, that's not what prefiguration is. Prefiguration explicitly denies the idea of shaping the material conditions so that good things emerge from them and instead says you have to choose good things from the start. Like, literally that's what it means. Instead of saying "we will use military force right now to defend ourselves until we can produce the conditions of international peace", prefiguration says "start from the position of non-violence otherwise you will always have violence". That's what anarcho-pacifism is.

Are you sure you even understand prefiguration? Marxism holds the doctrine that you have to shape the material conditions to produce the outcomes you want.

Having capital owners pinky swear to make communism real after the next fiscal quarter isn’t going to do it.

I don't think you understand anything about anything at this point. Maybe try engaging with ideas that you don't like for a change. You learn a lot more reading things you disagree with than reading things you do.